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117 Chapter Eight “I Don’t Want Your Sacrifice”: The Morality of the Son in Crime and Punishment T H E M E N TA L I T I E S Dostoevsky eventually labels “Russian ” and “Jewish” and his problematic characterization of redemption through the Crucifixion continue to evolve in Crime and Punishment. The attitude that accepts the suffering of others as the price of one’s own wellbeing was first expressed by Varvara Alekseevna in Poor Folk, where she accepts Devushkin’s loss as her gain. This attitude toward others acquires new and surprising dimensions in Crime and Punishment. The novel explores the ramifications of this mental operation by showing how it can develop into the philosophy of utilitarianism, based on the presumption that some have the right to make cost-benefit calculations about human life. We expect negative or ambiguous characters such as Luzhin and Lebeziatnikov to espouse the legitimacy of utilitarian calculations, but we may be less prepared to discover that the mentality condoning this way of thinking isn’t limited to those who are under the sway of fashionable Western ideologies. Notes from the House of the Dead upsets expectations shaped by Dostoevsky’s later writings and reveals surprising aspects to the origins of his antisemitism by portraying a (negative) spiritual affinity of Russians and Jews. Crime and Punishment defies our expectations by linking Christianity to what Dostoevsky, when writing in his personal notebooks or speaking in a more autobiographical voice in genres such as the speech (e.g., the Pushkin Speech), essay, or travel narrative, asserts is its irreconcilable opposite, allegedly Western and un-Christian utilitarianism. Crime and Punishment suggests that the basis of utilitarianism—the belief that some may be sacrificed for the good of others—may be the foundational principle of Russian society and Christianity as well. The novel associates contemporary Western utilitarianism with a kind of sacrificial exchange logic that Raskolnikov perceives to be the basis of the Crucifixion. Raskolnikov’s perception of a shared emotional and philosophical logic linking the Crucifixion with Western utilitarianism is never fully repudiated. The pervasiveness of this logic in the novel is a primary obstacle blocking redemption that is not tainted by an exploitative relationship to the suffering of others. Chapter Eight 118 Raskolnikov perceives sacrificial exchange logic, and the utilitarian calculations it supports, informing everything around him, from the behavior of his family to the structure of society to the Crucifixion as he understands it. He tries but fails to find a viable, morally superior alternative to this logic. Crime and Punishment suggests that everything is contained within this logic: the state of affairs Raskolnikov perceives around him, in which his mother is willing to sacrifice her daughter for the sake of her son and in which society tolerates the suffering of some for the benefit of others; the murder itself, which he justifies as the suffering of one for the good of others; and the Christian faith that allegedly redeems him in the epilogue, a redemption achieved over the corpses of several women (the pawnbroker, Lizaveta, and Raskolnikov’s mother, whose death is precipitated by his crime). The Christian faith Raskolnikov acquires at the end of the novel recapitulates his initial moral error, the thinking that led him to commit the murder. The epilogue defines Raskolnikov’s resurrection as the realization that his bad deeds can be paid off by performing good ones. This belief that bad deeds can be paid off with good works was precisely the initial moral error, the thinking Raskolnikov used to justify the murder. The faces of Raskolnikov and Sonia “were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life,” the narrator proclaims; “he had risen again” (CP, 504). Thinking of Sonia, Raskolnikov “remembered how continually he had tormented her and wounded her heart. . . . But these recollections scarcely troubled him now; he knew with what infinite love he would now repay all her sufferings [on znal, kakoiu beskonechnoiu liubov'iu iskupit on teper' vse eti stradaniie]” (CP, 504; Pss, 6:422). The new Christian life into which Raskolnikov is resurrected will be attained the same way he thought a new life would be attained after the murder . The same language of heroics, striving and suffering in atoning—literally purchasing—permeates how preconversion Raskolnikov thinks about his life after the murder and how the narrator describes his life after resurrection. “He did not know that the new life would not be given to...

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